Halfway Attendances

Ok folks, after 11 games we are half way through the regular season. So I thought I'd post the attendance stats so you can see the movers and shakers.

maybe that is because the 2011/12 figures are for the whole season and the 2012/13 for up to now. and the ones used in the meeting were a direct comparison (as in number of games)

The Bedford figure will be inflated by the very large attendence for the Newcastle game (over 4000). I expect the 2nd half of the season average will be lower, although the boxing day game has tended to draw in 3000+ in recent years

Edited by Bluesman11 - 05 Dec 2012 at 15:13

Getting accurate attendance figures (or to be more specific, 'tickets sold' figures) in a timely fashion from some clubs is impossible, certainly for the purposes of including them in that day's match report.

I have heard many times of clubs that include season tickets sold in the match day total, irrespective of whether those people actually turn up. I have always thought that this practice was wrong.

To me, attendance numbers should be just that - a count of the number of people who choose to enter the ground for that match. Anything else is, in my humble opinion, nonsense.

All sources of attendance figures across the leagues are also continually accused of being in-accurate.

I suspect the accusations of in-accuracy are down to many reasons but there does not seem to be any requirement from either the games administrators or local authorities (from a Health and Safety perspective) to report accurately the number of people in a ground. With attendances of in excess of 1,000 at many games and over 3K and 4K on a number of occasions, this surprises me.

It also amazes me the number of attendance figures that are reported as round numbers, e.g. 950, 1500, etc. That might happen on very rare occasions but certainly not the rate at which they are reported.

I fail to see why there's so little concern from the game's governing bodies to get accurate numbers. Surely that must be in the interests of the game as if you can't measure accurately the attendances, you will be unable to measure how changes are helping or not the game grow and develop.

Rant over!

Albion slight fall in numbers, albeit down by a very tiny amount, is very probably due to the appalling weather for the Bristol game.  I'm surprised anyone turned up at all...

Most Pirates' home games have coincided with bad weather, depressing gates for the Falcons game in particular.

Falcons, of course, being an "elite" team, previously in an "elite" league, employ laser(?) barcode readers so should have crowd numbers in almost real time. Also like some other teams, their ticket checkers are third party staff, and so their figures are probably more objective. Other clubs have "clickers" which would be less rigorous.

Bluesman11 wrote: Seems Doncaster's switch to Friday nights hasn't had a negative effect on attendences

SK 88 wrote: Phil, certainly in the bigger stadiums there is a requirement to know how many people are in the ground as part of your fire safety certificate. Tickets sold is counted for VAT.  VAT on ticket sales only becomes collectable once the event has happened, so the season tickets have to be counted in every game as progressively more and more of the VAT on it becomes collectable. Any club charging for entry must keep the second figure, almost all clubs fire safety certificate will need the first collecting.  <!-- bmi_SafeAddOnload(bmi_load,"bmi_orig_img",0);//-->

What's VAT?